Is Israel uniquely bad, or has hypocrisy towards the Jewish state become so widely accepted among some progressives that even an eminent scholar like Hawking is susceptible to hypocritical and lazy double standards?
After a great deal of confusing reports, it was confirmed yesterday that physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking has pulled out of a conference in Israel next month after being lobbied by pro-Palestinian campaigners.
Initially some had claimed his decision to pull out of the conference was due to ill health, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval cleared the matter up.
“This is his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there.”
So “respect for the boycott” was a humanitarian gesture, then?
Ok. But why did professor Hawking see fit to visit Iran in 2007 for a conference? As far as I am aware, there was no statement at the time from Hawking refusing to travel to the Islamic Republic out of “respect” for the country’s political dissidents, or until the government stopped executing homosexuals.
A year earlier, in 2006, Stephen Hawking visited China, whose government is responsible for large scale human rights abuses in Tibet. Tibet is, as Human Rights Watch noted several years before his visit, “a place where some of the most visible and egregious human rights violations committed by the Chinese state have occurred”. A 2008 UN report found that the use of torture in Tibet was “widespread” and “routine”.
There’s no need to be an apologist for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to question where professor Hawking’s moral compass was when he chose to visit these two serial human rights abusers – and ask why it has suddenly appeared when the country in question is Israel.
Is Israel uniquely bad, or has hypocrisy towards the Jewish state become so widely accepted among some progressives that even an eminent scholar like Hawking is susceptible to hypocritical and lazy double standards?
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346 Responses to “So why did Stephen Hawking think it was ok to visit Iran and China?”
shalomaleichem
I didn’t say the aims are necessarily motivated by racism (although for some they may be) but rather that
Try constructing any reasonable anti-racist movement which doesn’t include discrimination on grounds of nationality and you are left with, for example, a situation whereby you can’t define as racist a British university that doesn’t hire Irish academics or admit Irish students on account of “all Irish being stupid”.
Yes we have reached an impasse; you are abandoning reason when you find its conclusions unpalatable.
Tim Holmes
So you’d be happy to impugn the motives of those that upheld the boycott of South Africa on the same grounds? If you wouldn’t, you’re being grossly hypocritical. If you would, you’re not progressives.
An Iranian
Well, I don’t know about the Press TV news piece you have linked to, but as an Iranian living in Tehran, I can confirm that Prof. Hawking never came to Iran. Either the planned trip did not materialize, or there was no such plan to begin with (like so many other Press TV news). So stop criticizing him for a trip he did not make.
However, I do support what he has done; fact is Israel, within the 1967 borders, is an occupying force; simple as that. And I think this shows why you can not really criticize Israel.
JarekAF
But given that Israel has three times offered the Palestinians all of Gaza and almost all of the West Bank plus land swaps
I guess those Palestinians just don’t want to be free. Keep living in your bubble.
Chirag
Right you are. In exactly the same way that the non-cooperation movement in India called against the British was racist and the anti-apartheid movement in SA and beyond were unspeakably racist.